From these quotations, order, domination over self, and the conquest of the material world, stand out as touchstones for civilization. More concrete tests, however, have been demanded and proposed. From the standpoint. of social welfare, for example, Professor Ogg summarizes the last 125 years of European history as a period of wonderful progress, with abolition of privilege, establishing of equality, freeing of thought and expression, scientific discovery applied to human amelioration, and a multiplicity of forms of insurance as its chief marks. From the standpoint of political theory Professor Hobhouse finds notable progress in the extension of social order, solidarity, widening of the social unit, impartial justice, rational morality, freedom, mutual forbearance and aid.2 To M. Dellepiane is due credit for a remarkable attempt to work out an objective analysis in extreme detail. It may be impossible to agree with him as to the existence of all the indices of progress he cites or as to the exact significance of each and all of them; nevertheless his list is challenging. It includes (to select only a few): amelioration and generalizing of material well-being; spirit of enterprise; high development of social and industrial machinery; elevation of coefficients of nuptiality and natality; rarity of genesic aberrations; disappearance and disapproval of dueling and bullying; preoccupation with public affairs, interest in civic life, strict performance of duties as citizens, annulling of influence of politicians, absence of electoral corruption, or narrow chauvinism; disdain for plutocracy; prestige of

and Progress, 3d ed., 135-140, 397-408; George, Progress and Poverty, Bk. X, chap. iii; Kropotkin, Anarchist Morality, 23; Lavrov and Kareyev, quoted in Hecker, Russian Sociology, 117, 195–6.

1 F. A. Ogg, Social Progress in Contemporary Europe, chap. i; ex-Justice Hughes has practically a parallel list in his Conditions of Progress in a Democratic Government, p. 6.

L. T. Hobhouse, Social Evolution and Political Theory, 152-3.

intellectual and moral élites; respect for performance of individual duties; sentiment of security for persons and property; respect for law and the principle of authority, wide-spread conviction that every attack on the rights of another is an attack on one's own rights; religious tolerance, respect for ecclesiastical properties; elevation of the level of popular education and reduction of the number of illiterates; spread of scientific curiosity and absence of unhealthy curiosity; tendency to metaphysical speculation and idealism; love of noble and serious art, disdain for the frivolous and unhealthy, diffusion and purifying of esthetic taste; purity of morals, absence of pornography in streets, spectacles, and publications; family solidarity, cultivation of domestic virtues, moderation in expenditures for luxuries, respect for parents and superiors; spirit of order and discipline; love of work; general observance of rules of courtesy and civility, hospitality for strangers; aversion for bloody spectacles (e.g., bull fights, cock fights, pugilism); diminution of the coefficient of mortality, rise in the average duration of life; immigration; decrease of pauperism, begging, vagabondage, prostitution, alcoholism, morphinism, tobacconism, criminality, insanity, suicide, gambling, illegitimacy, infant-abandonment, abortions, Malthusian practices; education of the social conscience; tranquillity and general optimism; faith in progress and confidence in the future.1

By grouping these several concrete tests we reach a number of well marked indices of progress, industrial, educational, humanitarian, institutional. Or, expressing these ideas in somewhat less highly generalized form, we find a higher level of material wants and means of satisfying them; an expansion of the numbers of men, their energies and their contacts; greater emphasis upon intel

1 Rev. Internl. de Sociologie, January, 1912, pp. 21–2.

lectual values; wider participation in all material and intellectual gains; therefore, wider concepts of truth, greater liberty, greater order, and finally greater solidarity; for we are freest when love and intelligence constrain us to identify ourselves with our fellows. The humanitarian gain should express itself in the growing sentiment against war and slavery, in the conservation of infant and adult life, prevention of such diseases as tuberculosis, syphilis, and typhoid; in the desuetude of corporal and capital punishments; in fact, in the radical change of front in our whole penal machinery from retribution and terror to reformation and prevention. Institutional progress seems to be indicated by a general trend from force to rational persuasion. You may trace this movement in government, in education, in religion, in the family.1 Industrial progress should mean more real needs of more people more adequately satisfied, with a surplus for further development.. Educational progress should mean generalizing social achievement, increasing self-control, and decreasing social control by repression.

2

In the light of such comprehensive analyses some of the narrower tests for progress must be examined. First, the population test. Does progress mean necessarily a large and growing population? Does the total of well-being consist in a small per capita well-being multiplied into the largest number of units, or in a small number of units multiplied into a much larger per capita well-being?

1 On the whole, I prefer the phrase "rational persuasion" to such words as "reason" or "justice" used by some writers (for example, G. L. Beer in The New Republic, Feb. 12, 1916). Reason and justice sound static and savor of absolutes, besides carrying with them two millenniums of metaphysical controversy.

What, after all, is the test of a proper-sized population? The Social Darwinists reply, it must be large enough to admit of proper selection of the fit; population must be larger than economic or social development requires; it must be large enough to admit of necessary "wastage." 1 But such doctrines are melting away before the commonsense policy of conserving the population already born instead of over-stimulating the birth rate to serve some hypothetical race-end. The most serious-minded Eugenists now agree that not large populations, but good populations, are the ideal of civilized men.2 The King's strength lies more in the quality than in the mere numbers of his subjects. The greatest contributions to civilization appear to have come from small nations in the past; the future may tell a similar story.

Close analysis of the plea for large populations will usually reveal one or all of five motives: an attempt to justify existing social abuses and injustices on the score that nature is niggardly and that she must have a large number from which to choose those worthy to receive and hold her gifts; or a demand for cheap and superabundant labor, whose very abundance is the means of its subjection to capitalistic over-lords; or international fear and jealousy, whose natural expression is a large reserve force of military strength at home and colonization abroad with the surplus; or desire by a militant church or sect for the money, the votes, the children, and the souls of cohorts of believers; or sentimentalism prating about millions of baby souls that knock sweetly, earnestly, even desperately at the gates of life, and demanding with a tear in its voice, Shall we commit the crime of denying them entrance? On the

1 See, e.g., Benjamin Kidd, Social Evolution, chaps. ii, iii, pp. 209-10, etc.; Karl Pearson, National Life from the Stand point of Science, 25, etc.

2 For example, Havelock Ellis, Yale Review, April, 1912.

other hand, it is perfectly true that only with large (but note carefully, not too large) populations can come the minute division of labor necessary for a highly developed system of production, or the rapid increase of wealth and comfort according to the law of increasing returns. Among the marks of a "right-sized" population might be set down high average expectation of life, no perceptible deaths from need or misery; increasing fitness of the average individual; steady improvement in the arts of life; rising standards of living.1 It is evident that the test of numbers fails unless accompanied by certain qualitative tests.

A second test is increasing health and longevity. An able American representative of the medical profession declared recently that "the average length of life is the one and only sure index of whether the world is growing better; it is the unemotional but inexorable measuringrod of real social progress that can be told in figures. Other standards of measurement there are, but they are mostly vague, and founded largely on faith and hope. Here is one that is based on definite statistical facts." 2

In spite of many protests to the contrary, both health and longevity seem at the present moment actually to be on the increase. Throughout practically the whole of the Western world the death rate is pretty steadily declining. M. Levasseur by comparing statistical studies of France in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries discovered an increasing vitality in the French population, measured by decreasing or postponed mortality. Professor P. C. Mitchell states that the mean duration of life in France 1 Cf. Haushofer, Bevölkerungslehre, 96–7.

2 Dr. Norman Bridge, Amer. Jour. Sociol., 20: 449; cf. for a general discussion of the relation between sanitation and progress, W. H. Allen, Amer. Jour. Sociol., 8:631-43.

3 La Population Française, ii, chap. xvi.